


You Wake Up

by Winterling42



Series: Flesh and Blood and Dust [23]
Category: His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman, Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Daemons, Backstory, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-03
Updated: 2016-04-10
Packaged: 2018-05-31 01:08:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,608
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6449443
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Winterling42/pseuds/Winterling42
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On guard duty in the Vault, Furiosa cracks, or is cracked, and something of her past spills out.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

It was her sixtieth day in the Vault. Furiosa had come and gone, erratic as a ghost, on Joe’s orders. Some days with her crew, some not. Sometimes here, sometimes not. And she’d known it wouldn’t be easy, to stand in that place and breathe water-thick air and remember that the spider-web-struts of the glass dome didn’t hold her down like chains. 

But it was much, much harder to pretend that she was an Imperator when Angharad grew furious and brilliant as a bonfire.

“You couldn’t understand,” Angharad flung the words like rocks against Furiosa’s implacable face. “What it’s _like_ to _wake up_ in this place. Every morning.” 

_You wake up and wake up and wake up,_ Furiosa wanted to snap. _You wake up until you can’t bear it anymore, and then you wake up again._ Her outer calm, as solid as the stone of the Citadel, was wearing thin, and she was frightened of what lay underneath. Sixty days in the Vault, and she balanced on the edge of a knife, Angharad having worn away the solid ground under her feet. 

“Yes,” she said, her voice as still as living water. “I do.”

And all of them stood very silent for what seemed like a long time. Angharad’s lioness raised her lip as if to argue, but stayed silent when Furiosa looked at her. It seemed to the Imperator that her heart had stopped beating the moment she’d made the declaration. _Can’t trust them_ , her ears hissed with hot blood. _Can’t trust them._

“Can’t be true,” the Dag said, her voice flat and sharp as a knife. “Where’s your daemon?”

Furiosa inhaled sharply, the denial of three thousand days conditioned into her bones. And then, without answering, she exhaled again, closing her eyes. “He’s out,” she said drily. 

There was another long silence, and as it stretched on she forced her eyes open. The wives had drawn back into a cluster; Capable’s fingers tight on the lion’s golden fur, Angharad’s hand on Toast’s shoulder. They did not look _afraid_ of her, precisely, but they did not trust her either. 

_Good_ , Furiosa thought, flexing her human fingers. _There might be hope for them yet._

“Is this true?” Ms. Giddy was the one who always kept them talking, and now she broke the silence with her curious words. Furiosa blinked and turned the the old woman with a raven on her shoulder, wondering how someone with so much curiosity had survived for so long. 

“It’s true,” Angharad said the words before Furiosa did, and the Imperator glared at her, fists clenched, a second away from violence. “You’re not like the War Boys. You have a daemon out on the winds. You told me so, that day on the sand.”

“That was a long time ago.” That was a lifetime ago. _Can’t trust them_. Furiosa’s blood hissed through her, faster and faster. She had to focus, shut out everything she could, to hold back the torn and broken parts of her that were longing to fall out. She was not this broken thing, she could not afford emotions or a daemon. 

Everything was so clear outside this place, these rooms. The Wives were as blurry as water on the desert sands, mucking up her navigation. She hated it while she was here, longed for the clean smell of guzzoline in her nose and grease on her hands. Even the thundering sharpness that came with a fight would be better than this. Furiosa longed for something to put her fist through.

“Ah,” Miss Giddy nodded knowingly, “A witch.”

Angharad looked to their teacher, something between confusing and startled understanding half-hidden by the fall of her hair. 

“My mothers were witches,” Furiosa corrected without thinking, her voice hard as steel. The words cut her on their way out, left her bleeding inside, but they were already said. It was too late to take them back. “I am not.”

“You could be,” Cheedo said, her shy words following a truth that welled out like spring water. Clear and inevitable and true. When Furiosa turned to look at her, surprised enough that it was not quite a glare, Jiemba turned into a mouse and hid in her hair. “That’s what witches are.”

“How would you know?” Furiosa asked, the anger in her rasp falling away, stuttering like a stalled engine. Her uncertainty made Cheedo bolder; the girl fidgeted and stood a little straighter. The Dag put a hand on her shoulder, watching Furiosa with a fox’s hunted eyes. 

“That’s how it goes in all the stories,” she said, with a tiny, proud emphasis on _stories._ “Witches are born, not made. So if your mother was one, you can be one.”

“What was her name?” Angharad asked, more curious than she was gentle. Furiosa took a shaking breath, and then another. 

“It doesn’t matter,” she said, knowing only that it _did_ matter. Something had fallen, she was vulnerable. Just because it felt good to talk about her past, felt like for the first time the Green Place was _real_ , didn’t mean it was safe. It was never safe, _she_ was never safe. If the Citadel had taught her anything, it was that. 

_Can’t trust them_. She told herself, but for the first time she didn’t know if she believed the words. 


	2. Chapter 2

She could not be tempted to say another word for twelve days. 

Angharad was furious — had thought they were finally getting somewhere _good_ under all Furiosa’s Citadel masks. She brooded when Furiosa was gone from the Vault, and would not be drawn away from the Imperator’s side when she was present. Capable, perforce, was with her, an anxious, sometimes disapproving presence. (But she would not have been Capable if she did not look at people and see who they were, and for Angharad if no one else she would see Furiosa as more than Imperator. More than the skull at her waist.)

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Angharad asked, to Furiosa’s stubborn silence. “Maybe not when we were free. When we were Wretched. I didn’t need to know, we were just ourselves and no one else. But you stood here, knowing how much I hurt and saying _nothing_.”

Furiosa said nothing that day. 

Miss Giddy did not throw questions at her like Angharad did, like they were stones. The old woman sat in the one comfortable chair in the Vault and _watched_ , and when she wasn’t watching, her raven was. It was the raven that got to Furiosa, the ragged raven that looked a bit like Valkyrie’s Keranos had, after they’d gotten caught in the sandstorm together. The memory hurt like a punch in the ribs.

To drown it out, Furiosa asked, “What do you _want_?”

Immediately, the conversation on the other side of the Vault faltered. Miss Giddy had been teaching the five of them, something to do with letters, Furiosa hadn’t cared. But now she clenched her fists and glared at them, struggling to keep her heartbeat steady. The Wives weren’t hunters, weren’t War Boys. If they saw her tremble, they would not push her into breaking.

She hoped. 

“I want to understand you,” Leander said, very quietly. He stepped closer along the stone ledge where he was perched. The ledge ended several feet from where Furiosa had been standing, and so she allowed the movement, but that did not make her breathe easier. “A witch who successfully separated from her daemon, but who stays in this place, serving that man?”

“We didn’t have a choice,” Furiosa found herself answering without meaning to, and now the lesson did fall silent. They were listening. “We– I told him to go. It was safer. We knew we could survive it.” None of them here understood, could understand, the difference between _knowing_ you could survive something and then having to _survive_ it. Furiosa remembered the first day alone, barely able to stand, and want rose up in her throat like fire, a want to make these Wives realize how much that safety had cost. 

“Where we came from, there was ritual behind that test. There was…meaning. Here it was just being _alone_.”

“Where did you come from, Furiosa?” The question was soft, almost timid. It came from Adara, who had inched close to her while Furiosa had been watching the raven. Furiosa glanced up towards the Wives, noting with relief the vixen on Dag’s lap, the cardinal perched bright as blood on Cheedo’s shoulder. 

“A better place than this,” she said.

And she told them stories. Furiosa shared memories of the Green Place as slowly and reluctantly as she would have spilled her own blood, but she shared them. She had walked barefoot in rich, living soil, had smelled crushed grass in her hands. Telling those stories, she lived them again. Living them, she felt like those memories were the real part of her, and that the Imperator was only a ghost. 

Furiosa told them about the clans, the tents of the Mothers and the fields of young wheat waving in the sunshine. She told them how she’d learned to hold a rifle in two whole hands, how she’d made dyes with the Hell Cats one summer and had her hands stained red the whole winter long.

As she told them, she remembered how to count seasons, not by days but by the growing of the leaves around you, and the Dag’s eyes shone with tears that day. After that Furiosa was sent back to the Garage caverns and her crew, and for twenty-four days Furiosa could almost forget the place inside her where the Vuvalini lived, still, in their Green Place, far away.


End file.
